Green Building Elements

Author’s note: The following article on home heating is the second in an eight-part series.

What is Heat Exactly?
If we’re going to talk about better ways to heat a home, we’d better have some idea of what heat is. What you experience as heat is just the energization of the molecules in your body. Heat is the energy that gives those molecules kinetic (vibratory) energy.

Obviously, your body produces its own heat through the metabolic process (burning calories); the important thing is that your environment neither inundates you with excess energy (when it’s too warm), or draws too much energy away from you (when it’s too cold). This begs the question, how does your environment give or take energy from you? Read the rest of this entry »

Author’s note: the following article on home heating is the first in an eight-part series. The series specifically targets climate found in the San Francisco Bay Area, but has applicability elsewhere.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, heating and cooling amounts to 46% of all energy consumed by our homes. Water heating uses another 14%. In coastal California, where extreme heat is rare and winters are mild, a properly sited, well designed passive solar home can generate its own heat and hot water, and do without air conditioning.

Historically, few homes are so well sited or built. Since our area has more heating days than cooling days, most homeowners need a heating system. What few know is that many indoor air quality problems can be by-products of forced air heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems installed in their homes. Read the rest of this entry »

Relaxation!
Fashion!
Celebrity!
Botox!
Booze!
Interiors!
Green!

Yes, most of this list refers to the Brit series Ab Fab but if Eddy and Patsy turned in their smokes and cocktails for organic and sustainable munchies then they too would be excited for the opening of the Epi Center MedSpa, the first LEED certified MedSpa in the country. (Another LEED spa exists in D.C. but it isn’t a MedSpa). So, because fictional characters from a long ago Brit TV series couldn’t check out this just opened San Fran based spa, I decided that I had to do it. Read the rest of this entry »

Aerogel is almost a product out of science fiction.

Nicknamed “frozen smoke,” aerogel is extremely lightweight material, with a density only 3 times that of air. Only a small fraction of a volume of aerogel is the material itself. Most of the volume is filled with air. This makes aerogel an excellent insulator. (Aerogel provides nearly 40 times the insulation of fiberglass insulation.)

Aerogel can withstand great pressures and is also an excellent sound insulator. Aerogels can also be used to absorb airborne pollutants and have been used to clean up oil spills. NASA also used a section of aerogel as part of its Stardust probe to collect samples of material from the tail of a comet.

Aerogel is available for some high-performance applications, but due to its high cost, it has not been widely used. However, new research from a Malaysian scientist offers the potential to drastically reduce the cost of producing aerogel, and could lead to new possibilities for its use as a building and insulation material.
Read the rest of this entry »

Although they sound like they are different terms for the same thing, geothermal energy and ground source heat pumps are two different systems, with little in common other than that they are making use of what lies below the surface of the Earth. They do it in very different ways, however.

A geothermal energy system uses heat from below the surface of the earth as an energy source, much like solar panels capture sunlight and convert it into useful energy (electricity or hot water). A geoexchange system with a ground source heat pump (GSHP) is more akin to a hybrid automobile. It is not a method for generating energy, but a method for more efficiently using energy. It still takes energy input to operate a GSHP system, but a GSHP can be as much as 300% to 400% more efficient when compared to highly efficient furnaces, which are typically in the high 90s for efficiency percentage.

Read the rest of this entry »

Photo Credit: Heat-Kit.com
Heating your house with firewood is completely retro. I mean, cutting up trees and burning them, that’s just so old fashioned and inefficient, and not green at all.

Right?

What do you mean, wood burning can be green?

In fact, masonry heaters (which are also sometimes called “Finnish heaters” or “Russian heaters”) can be a green source for heating a home. While a traditional fireplace may be only 10% efficient (which is to say not!), a masonry heater can be 90% efficient. A well insulated house (even in a cold, Canadian location) can be heated on a single cord of wood per season. In a sense, a masonry heater is to a traditional fireplace what a compact fluorescent (or, even better, and LED light) is to an incandescent bulb.

The key, as is the case with passive solar heating, is thermal mass. When heating is taking place, you want to capture and store as much of that energy as you can, so that you can use it throughout the day. The masonry heater does this with a large structure containing a series of baffles, all of which gets heated up from a fast, hot-buring fire. By using a series of baffles in the structure, the heater ensures that most of the heat goes into the stone of the heater itself, rather than shooting up the chimney to be wasted, as is the case with a traditional fireplace.

Once heated, the thermal mass of the heater slowly radiates heat into the surrounding space over the course of a day. Because the heat radiates from the thermal mass in a straight line, spaces in direct line of sight to the heater are going to be better served than small closed-off rooms away from the heater. A masonry heater is not likely to be something that can easily be added to an existing home. The design of the entire house needs to be considered in order to get the best use from a masonry heater.

The carbon impact with this kind of wood burning is actually fairly benign. Firewood contains recently sequestered carbon, carbon removed from the atmosphere during the life of the tree. This carbon is re-released to the atmosphere when the wood is burned, where it can be reclaimed by other trees and plants. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, have had their carbon sequestered for millions of years. By burning fast and hot, the masonry heater produces less of the soot, creosote and other by-products that are formed when a fire smolders and burns slowly. This makes it less polluting as well as more efficient.

A masonry heater doesn’t make sense for every location (nor does any other technology). It would make no sense to have one in a city where the firewood needed to be trucked in from a distant source. But for a location where firewood is a readily available local resource, it can be worth considering. And with a masonry heater, burning wood can be a green heating method.

Sources:
Alternative-Heating-Info
Green Mountain Soapstone
Heat Kit
Tulikivi